Meek shall inherit the earth

 “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” (Gospel of Matthew 5:5, New Testament). God blesses those who are humble, for they will inherit the whole earth.

In a simplistic though fairly prevalent view, the world is often seen to be naturally dominated by those species, groups that are more intelligent and resourceful, powerful, especially ones who are conscious about their dominant status and are ruthless in perpetuating the same. The directions and the dynamics of the world affairs are assumed to be decided by the duel between the extraordinary and the powerful adversaries who, though, share their vaunted ambitions to dominate these proceedings. The meek, by definition, do not figure in these power equations. They are too ordinary, small in stature and low in the scale of their ambitions. Like the grass falling in the path traversed by the horses carrying the marauding armies or under the jackboots of their equally intrepid enemies, many among the meek will be trampled, charred and decimated. But like the grass they will survive being multitudinous, even grow from the ashes, from the unlikely shelter under the boulder and cover the slopes and the ridges, plateaus and the valleys, soak the sun and the rain and continue to thrive long after the gory and destructive competition has stopped. In that sense, the meek may have a greater chance of escaping complete and systematic erasure which their more powerful and assertive brethren are likely to suffer, and therefore have, as a class (individuals may be mauled), a better prospect of survival and might inherit the earth after all, however scorched it is rendered by the big players, and grow life out of the waste land.

Karl Marx used the concept of a so-called “Asiatic mode of production” to characterise the slow and meandering dynamics of the socio-economic and political development in the Indian subcontinent till the advent of the British rule in the middle of the 18^th century. His descriptions in his writings during 1850s call to mind almost an instantiation of the above. The history of India from ancient times has been replete with instances of major kingdoms and empires being overrun and visible symbols of their rule having been razed to ground by invading armies of rival kings in a bid to expand their own fiefdoms. However, almost as a rule, Marx had observed, these big overthrows and takeovers have largely left the plebian populace to live their poor marginalised lives in isolated village communities. The latter were loosely administered by local authorities who in turn were responsible for remitting retainership fees (in turn extracting a tax from the villagers for the communally held and worked land by way of a part of the produce) for the region of their dominance to, say, the potentates of the provincial Hindu kingdoms in earlier times or the emperors under India wide Mughal rule later. For the people at the ground level, the king or the sultan was distant, deity like, dominant and dangerous but also in some way benevolent to his subjects in the matters about construction of large public works like irrigation assets. But his writ at the local level used to be less oppressive and systematic as it became with the introduction of what is known as the “Permanent Settlement” introduced in 1792 by Lord Cornwallis, the governor of the Bengal Presidency under the burgeoning British Raj in the late eighteenth century.

And the village communities sometimes managed to maintain for even centuries a remarkable identity and a continuity of local practices – economic activities, cultural mores. They were too insignificant to have attracted notice or merit the brutal treatment meted out to the active and real adversaries to the kings and the sultans. However, this is not meant to make a case in favour of the state of affairs in pre-British India, nor a philosophical rationalisation of a state of mind that apparently helped the survival of the masses.

Time and again, it has been demonstrated empirically (in the stories upon stories of underdevelopment in the Indian subcontinent) that it is more than likely that what the meek and the docile (and they also mostly happen to be from the subaltern classes) eventually manage to inherit are the losses, the shards of shattered grandiose dreams spun and propagated by powerful rulers (including the ‘potential’ rulers), their ministers, advisers and other representatives. Not just due to their being weak and not having the ambition and the initiative to latch on to the bandwagon of progress to move out of the morass of backwardness but precisely because of their implicit trust and touching faith in those who take upon themselves the ‘onerous’ task of driving the chariot. And when the consequences of the historically wrong choices made by the latter become apparent the meek more often than not lack the wherewithal and the reserves to withstand any negative fall out over long periods or get away from them. 

Apart from the facile imagery conjured up by the biblical quote that seems to have an empirical authenticity for many, a lot of people, especially those that are religiously inclined, implicitly believe in the core idea by mixing it up with the familiar good and evil conundrum, that the good eventually prevails (does it always really?). In more modern context of pacifist activism (or what could be better described as politics of pacifism) this might have been a good slogan to be used as a strategic tool for political mobilisation through faith (ultimate triumph of the faith?). One would suspect that behind this there has been an astute appreciation of the cultural predisposition of a milieu, making a virtue of one’s weakness and make a political programme out of it. This is not necessarily a bad idea, after all the history of evolution is that of the survivors.

It is important, however, to take the proposition that ‘meek shall inherit the earth’ with more than a pinch of doubt, to ask why slogans and catch phrases such as these became necessary, who propagated them and what was the underlying purpose?